Dear Yahoo; Your Fired

I have used and recommended Yahoo Mail to family, friends and clients for the better part of a decade; unfortunately over the past few months Yahoo Mail has become completely unusable.

Starting in late June, I started receiving intermittent authentication errors when I tried to retrieve my e-mail using your POP3 server. These authentication errors lasted anywhere from a few hours to most recently a couple of weeks now.

I’ve contacted your so called customer care multiple times to try and find a solution; unfortunately they’ve been unable to address the problem… The most frustrating part of this has been their canned responses, every single contact with customer care results in the same boiler plate troubleshooting script… First check the settings in your e-mail client, if that doesn’t solve the problem reset your password. When those steps fail to resolve the problem they invariably try to pin the blame on either my ISP, or my security software saying “They must be blocking access to our mail servers”.

That’s bullshit; I’ve been in the IT business long enough to know how to diagnose and replicate a problem… and I can replicate these authentication errors across multiple systems and networks.

I’ve also tried using Gmail to POP mail from your mail server… Guess what I get the same authentication errors there that I’ve gotten with every e-mail client I’ve tried.

In short I can send mail, but I can’t retrieve it… SMTP works, POP3 and/or IMAP don’t. Simply put, your POP3 server is rejecting my credentials… One of the trouble shooting documents your so called customer care team sent me was actually quite helpful. It suggested turning off SSL encryption and setting to TCP port for the POP3 server back to the default value of 110. I did just that and ran tests with WireShark – a network protocol analyzer running so I could watch the handshake between my e-mail client and your POP3 server. I offered to provide these logs to your so called customer care, they never responded.

Bottom line; at his point regardless of whether or not you are able to resolve this issue whatever confidence I have in Yahoo has been destroyed. Consequently, you’re fired. I have notified family, friends and associates to begin use one of my other e-mail accounts and will be canceling Yahoo Mail Plus account and closing my Yahoo account by the end of the year. I no longer consider Yahoo to be a reliable service provider.